CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER
AT HOME
"This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin\' o\'t."
Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on
France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set
people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts
should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that
United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so
many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts,
from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the
Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross
the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the
race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to
assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the
Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was
but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show
in Mousehole, on St. Michael\'s Bay, the house of the last Cornishspeaking
woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller
through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea
Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of
China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a
hundred varying stages of transition.